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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

> As revealed by Snowden, US can compel tech companies to help their intel services too.

Precisely.

People have short memories and don't seem to see the pot calling the kettle black. I expect better on HN. We have hard evidence that GCHQ/NSA have hacked pretty much everything yet far too often people ignore this to jump on the weakest of speculative hearsay to accuse without hard evidence our Chinese and Russian friends of stooping to our GCHQ/NSA levels of evil-wrong-doing.

Is this what they call xenophobia once you get to the facts?

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no? you really don’t see the difference between a foreign hostile government spying vs the domestic one doing it? i don’t think either is good but just because one happens doesn’t mean it’s in our interest to allow another. especially from the governments perspective. it has nothing to do with xenophobia.

> you really don’t see the difference between a foreign hostile government spying vs the domestic one doing it?

The foreign hostile government can't legally do anything to me based on the information it gains. At worst it can blackmail me or abuse access to accounts, at which point I'll have the protection of my government.

The domestic government can do a lot of damage with the information it gains and importantly, I have little to no recourse. If it makes up an excuse to seize my funds, I can't really do anything. If a three-letter agency blackmails me into doing something, who's going to protect me?

They're both bad but a foreign government spying on me is less bad than a domestic one.

A bit off topic but it sounded like you were implying that domestic was less bad. I believe the reverse.

From what I remember it was the NSA that hacked Huawei, the problem they had was that there were routers on the market that they could not backdoor as easily as products from Cisco and other Western vendors that were amenable to their requirements.

It may not be xenophobia, it might just be plain paranoia, either way there is some public diplomacy going on that is carefully crafted to get people to fear the 'enemy' hacking everything. Why attribute everything to malice? Ultimately there is good money to be made in selling routers particularly if you can get a municipality to spend proper money on providing connectivity for a city sized area. Huawei might not be a front for the Chinese army, they could be wanting to make profit from a legitimate product. They know full too well that any backdoor specials could compromise their entire business model to lose all of their contracts to put themselves out of business. Why would they run that risk?

Cui bono applies, by making accusations NSA/GCHQ can get them out of the market so that the only option for customers is to buy equipment that is hackable by them.

Trade wars bringing updated versions of Yellow Peril narratives into the 21st century.

For a significant number of people here the US is a foreign hostile government spying on all our comms.

but as a us citizen i could care less if the govt is spyin on non citizens. in fact, it might even be their job to, in order to keep us safe. the us isn’t responsible for treating everyone in the world as it’s citizens

and China is doing the same, and shouldn't be criticized for it

As neither a US nor Chinese citizen I don't see the big deal. Who cares if the US or Chinese government steals all your secrets

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